Postdoctoral position in experimental psychology, University of Copenhagen

Job content

The postdoc will be part of a project entitled Selection in Cognition funded by the Carlsberg Foundation and headed by Professor Søren Kyllingsbæk and Associate Professor Thor Grünbaum. Applicants are asked to situate and develop their research plan within the framework of the Selection in Cognition project. For more information about the project, please contact Professor Søren Kyllingsbæk, sk@psy.ku.dk or Associate Professor Thor Grünbaum, tgr@hum.ku.dk.

The larger project develops and tests a new theory of basic cognitive selection mechanisms by combining methods and perspectives from experimental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, mathematical modelling, and philosophy. The core idea is that selection in cognition may be understood as a biased competition between representations in a stochastic race (Grünbaum, Oren, & Kyllingsbæk, 2021). In a series of experiments, we have consistently shown that tasks-sets are competing biased by their importance and that this selection process is severely capacity limited (Oren, Kyllingsbæk, Dupont, & Grünbaum, 2024). We will extend our new experimental procedures and mathematical models to the study of selection in planning and problem-solving. If our conjecture is true, higher-order cognitive processes like task selection, planning, and problem-solving depend on the same type of selection.

The postdoc should be a researcher with a strong background in experimental psychology and cognitive modelling. During the employment, the candidate is expected to engage in the development of new experimental procedures and computational models that will enable us to test and develop our general theory of cognitive selection in the domains of task selection, planning, and problem-solving at both psychological and neurophysiological levels. We aim to use our intention selection paradigm to study task-sets within and between complex hierarchies of task-sets.

The successful candidate will be working in close collaboration with cognitive psychologists and philosophers, and other cognitive scientists and should be interested in the development of new experimental paradigms, modelling, and theory development. The postdoc is expected to conduct new experimental research and develop models during the period of employment. It is expected that the successful candidate will be present, part of the team, and partake in the activities at CoInAct on a daily basis. The postdoc will be physically located at the Cognition and Neuropsychology research cluster https://psychology.ku.dk/research/research_clusters/cognition-and-clinical-neuropsychology/, at the Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen.

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